The Inside Advantage: The Strategy that Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business [Hardcover]

 

 

Create your own review

I recently read two books that explain how to achieve and then sustain a decisive competitive advantage: this one written by Robert Bloom with Dave Conti and Steven Feinberg's The Advantage-Makers. Both Bloom and Feinberg stress the importance of being able to recognize opportunities that others don't see (overcoming what I characterize as "the invisibility of the obvious"); possessing sound judgment to determine whether or not a an attractive opportunity is also (key word) appropriate; knowing how and when to respond to each such opportunity; having sufficient resources and the willingness to commit them, sometime quickly; and meanwhile, remaining flexible and resilient. Feinberg's focus is on Advantage-Makers as he explains how these "exceptional leaders win by creating opportunities others don't."

Bloom takes a much different approach as he presents his material within a framework he identifies as "The Growth Discovery Process." It has four separate but related sequential stages, each of which Bloom explains with rigor and eloquence:

1. Determine WHO is the core customer most likely to buy the given product or service in the quantity required with a margin that ensures optimal profit

2. Then determine WHAT is the uncommon offering that can be owned and leveraged

3. Next, determine HOW the persuasive strategy will convince core customers to select the uncommon offering rather than competitive offerings

4. Finally, OWN IT! by taking certain imaginative initiatives that celebrate the uncommon offering so that it becomes indispensable to core customers. Some of the most valuable material in this book addresses (In Part 4, Chapters 10-12) one of the greatest challenges all organizations now face: How to create and then sustain a critical mass of what Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba aptly characterize as "customer evangelists."

In his Introduction, Bloom explains the meaning and significance of his book's title: "The best way to expand the size, scope, and profit of your business is to grow it from the inside, capitalizing on hidden strengths that already exist within the company or brand." First, it is imperative to formulate an appropriate strategy because (like a hammer) it will be needed to "drive" decision-makers through the aforementioned four-stage process. Think of Bloom as having many of the same functions and responsibilities, as did those trail masters who successfully led late-19th century relocations of thousands of cattle across the plains states, overcoming all manner of hardships along the way. Being a film buff, I am immediately reminded of Augustus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Captain Woodrow F. Coll (Tommy Lee Jones) in Lonesome Dove as well as Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) and Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) in Red River.

Bloom invites those who read his book to embark on a similar journey and he then accompanies them each step of the way, illustrating key points with an abundance of real-world examples from his decades of experience working with hundreds of clients. I especially appreciate Bloom's empirical approach and his relentless pragmatism. Although he has total confidence in "The Growth Discovery Process," he reiterates throughout the book's narrative is that it is merely a means by which to achieve and then sustain profitable growth...and do so with aggressive (i.e. "explosive") and imaginative but prudent initiatives that are most appropriate to the given organization.

I commend Bloom on stressing the importance of knowing what a company isn't or at least should not attempt to be, of knowing who its core customers aren't or at least shouldn't be, and of what not to do or attempt to do. More than 40 years ago, Peter Drucker spoke to this last point when observing that "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." Hence the importance of understanding who the core customer is and that profile is invariably the same as the profile of the most valuable and most desirable of current customers. Many companies make the mistake of not carefully selecting their customers, as Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad recommend in Competing for the Future. Some customers are only marginally profitable, others are unprofitable, and still others create so many problems with constant and unrealistic demands as well as inappropriate behavior that they simply aren't worth keeping, much less pursuing.

Credit Bloom with nailing the basics in this book. And I presume to point out that all of the exemplary companies he examines were once start-ups. Following precisely the same core principles that Bloom advocates, these "acorns" eventually became "oak trees" but even the stoutest trees need "pruning" from time to time.

I highly recommend this book as well as Feinberg's The Advantage-Makers. Also McConnell and Huba's Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods... And How Companies Create Them (Revised and Updated) by Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, Marti Barletta's Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market Segment and her more recent PrimeTime Women: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Business of Boomer Big Spenders, and Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See the customer review...

 

Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Search Listmania!